VOCAL CHAMBER MUSIC: ‘PIERROT’ & HIS CHILDREN

In writing chamber music, many 20th-Century composers have discarded traditional 18th- and 19th-Century forms--the string quartet, piano trio and so on--in favor of freer structures and more exotic instrumentation, often including the human voice.

It all began with Schoenberg’s “Pierrot Lunaire” (1912), scored for violin (doubling viola), cello, flute (doubling piccolo), clarinet (doubling bass clarinet) and piano. There is also a female vocalist intoning German translations of Albert Guiraud’s moonstruck poems in Sprechgesang , a sort of recitative in which the voice rises toward or falls away from an indicated pitch.

“Pierrot” makes its compact-disc debut in an overdue rerelease of the 1961 Domaine Musical edition led by Pierre Boulez (Ades 14.078, CD only), a tough, brilliantly executed performance in which Helga Pilarczyk delivers the compressed vocal lines with fittingly controlled intensity and only the barest suggestion of song.

“Pierrot” is coupled with another, later Schoenberg chamber work, his “Serenade” (1923)--the first of his works to employ the 12-tone method, in a remarkable (obviously) movement in which the bass voice (Louis-Jacques Rondeleux) sings a Petrarch setting, repeating the same 12 notes 12 times. Again, Boulez’s reading is diamond hard, searingly intense.

At the opposite end of the emotional spectrum from the haunted, sometimes hysterical--and, to a number of not necessarily wrongheaded listeners, funny--”Pierrot” is the swaggeringly jovial “Le bal masque” (1932) of Francis Poulenc, which is done to perfection by Britain’s Nash Ensemble (an eight-player ensemble of strings, percussion, winds and piano) with baritone Thomas Allen expertly projecting the pun-filled nonsense lyrics of Max Jacob, at times in song, at others recitative style, as if caricaturing “Pierrot.”

Allen is also the stylish protagonist of the raffish song cycle “Le Bestiaire,” to poems of Apollinaire. The conductor in both is Lionel Friend. Completing this delectable Poulenc program are the Sextet for Piano and Winds and Trio for Piano, Oboe and Bassoon (CRD Recordings 3437, CD only).

Perhaps the most celebrated latter-day spawn of “Pierrot Lunaire” is Pierre Boulez’s own “Le marteau sans maitre,” for six instrumentalists and a female voice chanting Surrealist--meaningless?--texts of Rene Char. The instrumentation and sound of this piece are nothing less than fabulous, with its infinitely varied percussive effects, shattering silences and startlingly abrupt tempo changes. The authoritative performance dates from 1964 (Ades 14.073, CD only), again with Boulez leading his Domaine Musical players, and mezzo-soprano Jeanne Deroubaix.

Also on the program are Boulez’s bland “Sonatine” for flute and piano and the tediously jangling “7 Haikai” of Boulez’s teacher, Olivier Messiaen.

Marc Neikrug, born in New York in 1946, may be best known as a pianist--notably as Pinchas Zukerman’s recital partner--but he is clearly a composer of substance and a man of the theater as well.

Neikrug’s haunting--he wrote both text and music--45-minute long “Through Roses” (1978), scored for eight instrumentalists and virtuoso actor, is the tortured monologue of a Jewish violinist and concentration-camp survivor relating the unspeakable horrors and ironies of the Holocaust. It is gripping, instantaneously effective stuff, Alban Berg-like in its musical style, with liberal, appropriately distorted quotations from Haydn, Bach, Schubert, Wagner and others.

The first recording of “Through Roses” (Deutsche Grammophon 415 953, CD only)--the title relates to the flower-filled garden of the Auschwitz commandant--must be a composer’s dream realized, with a group of stellar instrumentalists, including violinist Zukerman and the composer himself at the piano, under the direction of Christoph Eschenbach. But the focus of Neikrug’s chamber music-drama is veteran Austrian actor Will Quadflieg, whose one-man impersonation of all of suffering, wronged mankind is indescribably harrowing--and touching.

Another superb piece of acting is at the heart of a new recording of Stravinsky’s World War I marvel, “L’Histoire du soldat” (Nimbus 5063, CD only). Charles Ramuz’s French libretto, for a dramatic cast of three, has been wittily adapted by Alan Wiltshire and Adrian Farmer for a single, English-speaking actor: Christopher Lee, of British horror-flick fame.

And he’s marvelous, whether as the cocky Cockney soldier, the wheezing, wheedling devil or the supersuave storyteller. Lee, with his gorgeously resonant voice, crisp enunciation and penetrating characterization, is a one-man ensemble.

The musical performance, by seven members of the Scottish Chamber Orchestra (unidentified as individuals, an unpardonable oversight) under the snappy direction of Lionel Friend, is no less admirable.